More Talks

More recent Brontë-related talks:

February 23-25, 2012
The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900
University of Louisville

- Follow this Fellow: Re-Tracing Brontë's Narrative in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea,  Laura Quinlan DeJong, Florida Atlantic University

October 21, 2011
20th Annual Women & Society Conference
Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY

- The Transgression of Gender Boundaries in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Lisa Downward, Marist College

6-8 May 2012 Prague, Czech Republic 
4th Global Conference
Evil, Women and the Feminine

- (De)Constructing Evil: Bertha Mason’s Madness in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea,  Kirsti Cole, Minnesota State University, USA

This presentation explores the ways in which madness is constructed as a rhetorical tool for demonising the racial other in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Jean Rhys’ prequel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Antoinette Cosway’s life prior to her appearance as Mr. Rochester’s violently insane wife in Jane Eyre. The details of Cosway’s life, as provided by Rhys’s narrator, afford a template through which to problematise the ways in which the character is presented by Jane Eyre in Brontë’s novel. Antoinette, renamed Bertha by Mr. Rochester, is constructed as an object to be feared at best, something evil and monstrous at worse. Rhys’ narrator reconfigures the character of Bertha Mason, and offers a complicated commentary on the fear of women’s sexuality when the woman is outside of dominant, normative constructs surround class, race, and religion.

October 12 - 13, 2011
University Writing and Research Conference
The George Washington University

- Forever and Always, Jane Eyre: Creating and Defending a New Take on Brontë's Classic, Lauren Russell
- Jane Eyre Rewrite and Defense, Alexey Strakovsk
- In-Sufficiently Docile: Animating the Doll of Jane Eyre,  Morgan Viehman

26 March 2011  
Neo-Victorian art and aestheticism
University of Hull

- The Uses of Portraiture in Brontë Fictional Biography of the Interwar Period, Amber Theresa Pouliot, University of Leeds